Apart from that curious look upon its face, I have never found the Sphinx at Gizeh as impressive as the Sphingeion in Bœotia, the sphinx of Œdipus outside the gates of Thebes. This is merely a hill shaped like a sphinx; and there must have been another such hill at Gizeh, from which the Sphinx was formed. There is another within a walk of here; but it takes the shape only from a certain point of view--the western rock at Haytor, as one sees it on the road from Widdicombe. In a Dartmoor mist it looks stupendous, and surpasses the Sphingeion and the Sphinx. There is another sight within a walk of here, also recalling Greece; and this is Grimspound. When I have visitors who have been in Greece, I take them over Hameldon, so as to come down on Grimspound from above. I give no hint beforehand, and just wait to hear what they will say. And they always say:--“Mycenæ.” The impression goes off, when one begins to think of details; but at first sight it is vivid. Sometimes I take people up to Hittesleigh (or Hisley) Gate for the view of Lustleigh Cleave, and there await their comments. One man was an artist; and for a long while he was silent, and seemed to be drinking in the beauty of the scene. Then he pointed to some object in the middle distance, and remarked:--“I think I’d pick that out in Chinese White.” Another man who also painted, was silent also, and also seemed to drink it in; and he remarked:--“If I were going in for grouse, I’d put the butts round there.” Looking on things less practically, one fancies that the scene is all unchanging and unchanged, and that its aspect was the same when our ancestors were living in hut-circles and building cromlechs and kistvaens. It needs an effort to carry back the mind to earlier ages, when there was a little volcano in this parish, and a bigger one about a mile this side of Newton; or to ages more remote, when this tract of igneous rock was first upheaved, and these lichen-covered boulders came rolling down the slopes red-hot. And there will come a time when only the granite will survive, the rest all vanishing like the land between our Land’s End and the Scilly Isles; and then Dartmoor will be a group of islands, and Wreyland one of the outlying reefs. End of Project Gutenberg's Small Talk at Wreyland. First Series, by Cecil Torr